I have hosted several servers for several games over the years but they have huge disadvantages too. One of them being that server admins can see IP addresses of players, and that leads to DDoS. Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason, had a popular server(which turned into the only server as the game got old) where the admin would kick women if they didn't respond positively to his creepy flirting.
And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
This also describes the behaviour of common game providers. The difference is: you can switch to a different server if you are annoyed by this, but cannot get rid of the game provider/publisher.
> And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
This could in principle be implemented.
With multiplayer versus games that do not have a persistent world that players feel is their own, there's even less incentive for a player to want to host their own server. Minecraft is still an example of this: even without any Mojang hosted servers, the majority of players aren't joining random servers from a server list. They're joining the well-known and popular server networks, like Hypixel or Mineplex.
Just to be clear, you aren't paying for game server hosting, only for the console's lobby/matchmaking services. The game servers are still paid out of pocket by the devs.
This is why many games try to get away with player-hosted servers (which gamers misname P2P), where a player is assigned a host role by the matchmaking service and the rest connect to it for the duration of the match. Which means one other player can see your IP and if the server disconnects the match is interrupted.
Todays system certainly has trade offs but the competitive experience is so much better.
> heavily policed speech.
I also miss the days when there was no communication provided in-game. It's unnecessary for the vast majority of games. And if we wanted that, we used xfire or something external to collaborate, outside of what has now become yet another walled garden.